Stunned by the high costs of many of the new "Made for iPhone" (MFi) products? Apparently those high costs at least partially spring from Apple's high licensing costs. Change might be on the way, though, as Japanese site Mac Otakara reports (via MacRumors), as Apple has both reduced the licensing costs for the program and the price of the associated Lightning cables and other accessories.

The fees go all the way back to 2005, when MFi was better understood to stand for "Made for iPod." In order to ensure some degree of quality control, Apple allegedly required a 10 percent fee calculated from the wholesale price of the product in question.

Once the iPhone and the iPad were brought under the MFi banner, the Lightning cable introduced in 2012 was included in the program's guidelines on account of a "serialized authentication chip embedded in the connectors." The costs of all this carried over to new products such as the MFI game controllers released in the past few months, resulting in some hefty prices for the devices.

It's possible, however, that we're already seeing the effects of Apple's loosening of its own restrictions. After all, the SteelSeries Stratus (which we called the best MFi controller last month) dropped in price by 20 bucks by the time it was actually released, suggesting that SteelSeries was able to take advantage of the price drops in time for the launch of its product.

There's allegedly another reason for those high costs, though. According to MacRumors, Apple also insists that manufacturers adhere to the Cupertino company's supplier responsibility code. Under the terms of the code, employees should be able to work in safe working environments. To make sure the companies are playing along, the manufacturers in question are required to submit to inspections.

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